The Duality of Chinese Equatives : Comparison of Identicality and Equivalence
Minjun Park · Korea Journal of Chinese Language and Literature · 2018
Equative constructions represent the same quality or equal degree of the given dimension of two objects. This paper examines differences among three Chinese Equatives, namely Basic Equative, Conjoined Equative and Reach Equitive, aiming at revealing the key semantics of them. First, it presents a unified perspective on the overall Chinese Equatives by employing two opposite but complementary concepts, comparisons of identicality and equivalence. Through a series of syntactic and formal semantic analysis from this viewpoint, it demonstrates that Chinese Equatives inherently have a dual attribute of qualitative and quantitative meaning, which arises from the interaction of its semantic and syntactic factors embedded in the construction. This panchronic analysis also suggests Chinese Equatives have been developed along the path from the comparison of identicality to equivalence, in parallel with the implication that boolean qualitative comparisons are fundamental semantic foundation on which quantitative comparisons are based.